5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use Lossless File Formats
This is a follow up to last week’s post on 5 Reasons You Should Use Lossless File Formats. There are many good reasons to use lossless compression to store your digital media, but there are also many good reasons why you shouldn’t bother. Here are a few of the main points:
1. Hard Drive Space is Expensive
Although hard drive space is fairly cheap, there is also the cost of maintaining backups in case your main drive fails. A backup can be contained both onsite and offsite, which increases the cost even more. Furthermore, if you’re listening to audio on a portable player you may not even be able to find one with a hard drive large enough to fit your collection.
If you’re using a digital camera, using RAW mode can take up a significantly larger chunk of memory, which means more memory cards to juggle.
2. You Probably Won’t Notice a Difference in Quality
If your main source of listening to music is a $5000 stereo, you should look into the best lossless formats. If you’re listening to your music on an iPod with the standard iPod earbuds, you’re probably not going to notice a difference between .mp3 files stored at a high bit rate over a lossless file. And if you can’t tell a difference, then what’s the point of taking up more space?
For picture files you will probably edit the files once, and then never worry about them again. You will lose some quality when editing .jpg files, but will you notice it?
3. You Probably Don’t Care If It Lasts Forever, Either
Photos can be stored as jpeg files fairly easily, which takes up relatively little space compared to giant .tiff, .psd, or RAW files. Once you’ve done an initial editing of them, it’s unlikely you will revisit them again, so why not store them in a smaller format so they can be backed up offsite easily.
As for your digital music collection, if you were to lose your Duran Duran CD collection to a fire or theft, would you really care that much? Most likely insurance would cover the loss, and then you could just buy new copies of the CDs anyway.
4. It Can Waste Your Time
When you transfer media to and from your computer, the larger a file is the longer it takes to transfer. So when you’re uploading large RAW files from your camera to your computer, you have to wait longer. When your computer pulls them up to look at or to edit, it takes longer.
When you are backing up your media files to another disk, the more data you have to copy the longer your backup can take. This is especially true if you are doing offsite backups online. Copying over a few gigabytes of data could take a very long time.
5. Many Tools Are Not Compatible With Lossless
When I first switched to lossless audio files I started by encoding everything in FLAC files. That was fine for playing them on my computer, but I also use a Macbook laptop, and iTunes is not compatible with FLAC. So I had to re-encode everything into Apple Lossless, which took a few days. FLAC files are also not compatible with my Microsoft XBox 360, so I had to maintain one copy of lossless WMA files on my PC for streaming, as well as a copy of Apple Lossless files to use with my laptop when I am home.
If I had just used .mp3 files though, I could have easily shared a copy of every file across all of the platforms I have at home. This also goes back to #4, since it took a bit of time to re-encode over 100GB of music twice (once to WMA and once to Apple Lossless).
Conclusion
So there are 5 reasons you should store your files using lossless compression ratios, and 5 reasons you shouldn’t. Personally I store most of my files using lossless, but I don’t have so much that it is difficult to back it up on and offsite. Hopefully these ideas will give you a better idea of how you want to maintain your own digital library.
